


Rabbit Spiders

by Kittywitch



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, apparently inaccurate Australian slang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 15:48:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6913396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kittywitch/pseuds/Kittywitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In idle conversation with Adric, Tegan discovers that the Tardis translation circuit has been editing her speech slightly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rabbit Spiders

            Several thousand years ago in E-space, Sotir the Wise had proven that the sum of the sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle were equal to the sides of the hypotenuse. In N-space, it seemed that was proven by a gentleman named Pythagoras. Adric flicked to the next page and kept reading. With the other hand, he reached into a bag of dried vegetables he found in the Tardis’ galley. They were coated with some sort of spicy yellow-orange paste and just the sort of delicious that you could find yourself idly devouring while your attention was elsewhere, which was precisely what Adric was doing. Some of the theories the book was describing where comically simple to him, but others made him pause. Occasionally he would remember to apply the fact that E-Space was positive and that he had in fact learned all of these proofs before, but backwards. It was fascinating.

            The part of his mind that wasn’t occupied with either reading or eating registered that the door behind him had opened, and someone was entering the library. His first thought was that he quite hoped that it was Nyssa, because he quite wanted to see her. His second thought was that he quite hoped it _wasn’t_ Nyssa, because he wasn’t sure he wanted her to see _him_ with that orange-yellow paste all over his mouth. Rubbing his face roughly with the wrist of his tunic, Adric turned around in his chair.

 

            “Oh, it’s you.” he sighed, returning to his dried vegetables.

            “Nice to see you too.” Tegan sniffed. She strolled past Adric’s chair and towards the veritable forest of bookshelves.

            “ ‘Can’t miss it’ he said. ‘Biggest room in this level of the Tardis’ he said. ‘Nothing easier to find than the Tardis library.’ he said.” Tegan grumbled. “Not sure what sort of directions I expected out a man who lost a whole airport. I’ve been looking for this place all day.”

            “Are you looking for a book?” Adric asked. Tegan rolled her eyes.

            “Well, I’m not here to rabbit spiders.” she replied. Adric blinked, unsure if he had heard her correctly. Even if he _had,_ that was not an image he would have wanted even if he liked spiders. Spiders with or without large floppy ears were firmly in the category of things Adric didn’t want to deal with. And a spider the _size_ of a rabbit didn’t bear thinking about.

            “What did you say?” he asked, turning towards Tegan again. Tegan smiled like she’d gotten away with something.

            “I said ‘I’m not here to rabbit spiders’.” she laughed. Then Tegan blinked, as if she had just heard herself.

            “Did I just say ‘rabbit’?”

            “You just said ‘rabbit’.”

            “Did I say ‘rabbit’ the first time?”

            “Yes, you said ‘rabbit’ the first time.”

Tegan slowly and methodically wrote out a curse word in a very fine hand. Adric looked at it, and his mind argued with itself over whether it was in fact a curse word in the letters that the Doctor wrote in or the word “rabbit” in Alzarian runes. Finally it gave up and admitted it was probably a less polite word for mating. It made sense, after all ‘rabbit’ wasn’t a verb as far as Adric knew.

            “Can you read _that_ , or is the Tardis translating it to ‘rabbit’?” Tegan asked tersely.

            “I can read it,” Adric replied uneasily, “But I can’t imagine why you would ever do that to a spider.”

            “You wouldn’t, that’s the point!” Tegan snapped. “It’s just a saying we have in Australia!”

            “What the rabbit is wrong with Australia?” Adric asked. Tegan looked at him curiously.

            “You said-”

            “Rabbit.” said Adric intensely. He attempted to list every curse word he knew. “Peaches. Salamander. Great striped beach umbrella. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe… that last bit was Carroll!”

            “Have you even read Alice in Wonderland?”

            “That was Jabberwocky _,_ and I’ve read all of Carroll. I preferred his maths, but Alice was enjoyable absurdism. That’s what caught my attention with the Pythons _._ Best stuff your planet’s produced.”

“Look, I’m in the library because I’m looking for a book.”

            “Which book?” asked Adric.

            “Not a particular book exactly, but a series.” Tegan explained. “There was a book I liked as a nipper, fantasy novel, all dragons and wizards and adventure. ‘The Dragon and the George’ by a fellow called Gordon Dickson.”

            Adric made a face. The sort that Tegan had only really seen on Adric.

            “Why would you want to read that sort of thing?” he asked skeptically. “You hate all the monsters and dark ages things when we find them ourselves.”

            “Yes, but this is in a book where it belongs—oh, shut up Adric. The Doctor said that the author wrote some more in that series in the nineteen-nineties.” Tegan explained. “As long as I’m stuck on a time machine, I thought I’d look for the rest of the series.”

            “Isn’t that sort of cheating, reading the books before they come out?”

            “I’ll find it myself!” Tegan huffed, pointedly walking away from Adric. “If you’re going to be judging my taste in books, you can just rabbit off.”

**Author's Note:**

> The phrase Tegan attempts to use is "I'm not here to f**k spiders", which is (according to the internet, at least) an Australian phrase meaning "yes, obviously" or "I'm already doing that". I decided to combine this with the idea that Tegan exclaims "rabbits!" in place of swearing not because she's trying to edit her speech, but because the Tardis refuses to translate swearing.
> 
> I think Adric is eating sriracha-coated peas, which are delicious and I happened to be eating while I was writing this. It might be something similar with a different kind of vegetable, possibly from another planet.


End file.
